If The Dead Rise Not, Bernie Gunther #6, by Philip Kerr may just be the best of the bunch, so far, and I know, I keep saying that. And when you read KIf The Dead Rise Not, Bernie Gunther #6, by Philip Kerr may just be the best of the bunch, so far, and I know, I keep saying that. And when you read Kerr's work, you know no country gets to say let's Make X Great Again, because all countries are guilty, there's corruption and extortion and racism everywhere, just part of human dna. So in this one, after Bernie gets booted out of Argentina, he ends up in Havana, in 1954.
The first part of the book, however, takes us back to Berlin, 1934, where The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad but are facing foreign resistance because of its alleged mistreatment of the Jews. In actuality it is not alleged as we all now know. In particular, with respect to the Olympics, Hitler denied all Jewish athletes admission to German sports clubs, thus no Olympic participation. So how does the US and others agree to still participate? In part it is because Hitler bribes Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee to look the other way. And as we now know (see Rachel Maddow's Prequel, for one example exposing the historical record), Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford were only two of tens of thousands of Americans who were Nazi sympathizers. And we also know the mafia was involved in the production of the 1932 Olympic games, and we know the US had its own history of racism against blacks that was a model for Hitler's treatment of the Jews and anyone it didn't like. So how could the US point their fingers at Hitler? But, seriously, how could they not?! Oh, and we learn Bernie is .25 Jewish, which had to be hidden for him to do the anti-Nazi work he would do.
So in 1934, Bernie Gunther, house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel,, begins to work with an American Jewish journalist, Noreen Charalambides (though she is actually Eisner, as lots of people have shifting identities in these books), on an article exposing this farce, falls in love with her, and only gets out of prison when his lover agrees not to publish her article, at the hands of German Jewish gangster Max Reles. So the Berlin Olympics happen and Hitler gets to showcase himself on the international stage, as we all sweep his anti-semitism under the rug for the sake of the "purity" of the Olympic spirit. Noreen goes back to America, no contact between them.
[Note to self: What else was going on around then? Kristallnacht didn't happen until 1938, but in the Ukraine in 1932-33, Stalin was starving more than 4 million Ukrainians. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin waged a brutal war against the Soviet peasantry leading to the Holodomor, the terror-famine that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians during the fall and winter of 1932-33. In 1936, his Great Purge involved the killing of millions of Soviet citizens, including many Jews. In 1939 he purged all Jews from Soviet leadership and forged a murderous alliance with Hitler. Hitler, Stalin, Batista, FRanco, Mussolini, and fast forward to today.]
Fast forward to Havana, 1954, dictator Batista, probably a fan of Hitler, as all strongman authoritarian dictators would be, and Castro is in prison writing a manifesto about his communistic aims for Cuba. Cynical Bernie hates Batista, of course, but he also doesn't trust Castro not to become a dictator, either. Bernie also sees, for the first time, two key people: His long lost love, Noreen, now an accomplished writer, with a daughter (and dead husband, check) and that gangster Max Reles is also in town, offering to make peace, offering Bernie a job with his casino, while sleeping with Bernie's ex Noreen's daughter (!). In this section we see that Noreen had for a time driven an ambulance (like Hemingway) in the Spanish Civil War, and hangs out with Hem in Havana. And we see all the different mob families and moguls in town, including Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky, who hires Bernie to investigate a murder involving the crime families there.
The marvelous resolution (and some very moving revelations) of this one owes something to the resolution of Casablanca (you'll see). That I should have become tearful at the end of this detective historical fiction, well, I give a nod to Kerr, who in 2009 was awarded the world's most lucrative crime fiction prize, the RBA Prize for Crime Writing, worth €125,000. I know literary prizes sometimes, like Olympic contracts, emerge out of complicated ethical processes, but trust me on this one. ...more